1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image management system for photographing a customer as a visitor to a facility, such as a theme park, by using photography means, such as a camera installed at a fixed location, and for managing an image thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printing system has recently been proposed for photographing a visitor to an entertainment facility, such as a theme park, by using a camera fixed in an attraction, and for providing a print of image data obtained by the photography to the visitor. In such a printing system, a print is provided to a visitor at each attraction he/she visited. Therefore, a visitor needs to wait for a print at each attraction, which is troublesome.
For this reason, a system has been proposed for providing to a visitor a wireless tag, such as a wireless IC card, recorded with ID information of the visitor and for photographing the visitor by fixed cameras installed in a theme park (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,628,899). In this system, the ID information is sent at the time of photography from the wireless tag to communication devices installed with the fixed cameras. Image data obtained by the photography are stored in an image server by being related to the ID information. Therefore, the visitor can access the image server later, and can collectively view his/her images obtained in the theme park by searching for the image data based on the ID information. In this manner, troubles caused by waiting for a print at each attraction can be eased. Furthermore, in the system described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,628,899, a visitor can operate each of the fixed cameras by using the wireless tag for photography of himself/herself looking at the camera.
In addition, another photography system has also been proposed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 11 (1999)-215421. In this system, a remote control is used to operate a fixed camera installed in a theme park, and image data obtained by photography are printed after being classified according to the remote control. The image data can also be sent to the remote control for preview. According to this system, an image can be confirmed immediately after photography.
Moreover, still another system has also been proposed in U.S. patent Laid-Open No. 20020049728. In this system, image data obtained by a camera installed in a theme park are stored in an image server and image data having high probability of including a subject are searched for through recognition of the subject based on personal information, such as a face image for identifying the subject in an image. Furthermore, yet another system has been proposed for identifying a position of a subject and for searching for image data obtained by a camera installed correspondingly to the position as image data having high probability of including the subject (see U.S. Patent Laid-Open No. 20020001468).
In the photography systems described above, a visitor needs to visit a place in a facility where an image display terminal is installed in the case where the visitor wishes to view image data obtained by photography during his/her visit thereto to confirm the image data, to order printing of the image data, to delete of an unnecessary image, and to perform image processing on the image data, for example. Therefore, viewing image data in this manner is troublesome. According to the photography system described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 11 (1999)-215421, although a visitor can preview image data obtained by photography, images can only be previewed immediately after photography. In this system, all image data obtained by photography are printed. Therefore, some of the prints generated in this manner are not necessary in some cases.